Entrepreneurship
by Desbelleschoses
Summary: "I'm telling you, man; this little baby is my ticket to success." Havoc flicked his cigarette up and down with his tongue for emphasis. Rated T for a few swears and for the discussion of the use of adult themes in advertising. Oneshot.


"I'm telling you, man; this little baby is my ticket to success." Havoc flicked his cigarette up and down with his tongue for emphasis. "I'm gonna be living the good life. No more paperwork, no more colonel stealing my dates-"

Fuery tried his best to play off his snort as a sneeze. Havoc's blue eyes zeroed in on him for a moment before he looked back to Breda.

"Yessir, rich and famous." Havoc lifted the small, translucent box and tilted his head so that he could get the florescent lighting to shine off of it just right.

"And just how exactly is this flimsy chunk of plastic going to do that?" Breda inquired, genuinely curious as he took the box out of Havoc's hands. It wasn't anything special, save perhaps for the suction cups attached to the back.

Havoc looked pained. "Man, do you not know me at all anymore?" he groaned. "What's the one thing I always complain about? Don'tevensayitFuery." The small, bespectacled man hid his smirk behind his paperwork.

"Well, if it's not the colonel, it's gotta be how you can't smoke when you're showering," Breda surmised, mentally drudging through his friend's list of complaints.

"Exactly! Think about it. I come home from the eighth ring of hell that is Central Command, and all I wanna do is have a drink and a smoke, then take a hot shower. I can't do anything else until I've done that. So, I figure, why not take up less time? And that's when it hit me: the cig-saver!"

Fuery opened his mouth to tell his superior that smoking kills, and his brief reprieve while in the shower was probably doing him more good than he realized. He wavered in his resolve, catching Falman's knowing gaze before busying himself once more.

"You see, you just drop the cigarette in here when you have to move around in the shower, and then you pick it right back up when you want another puff!" Havoc slid the lid back and forth on the box excitedly. "No water can get in. It's genius!"

Without looking up from his intricate doodle, Colonel Mustang murmured "You know it can still get wet from your hands or the showerhead, right?"

In an emboldened move that Havoc would never have taken were Hawkeye in the room, he grinned mischievously and shot back "Yeah, I guess you'd know all about the reactions between water and fire, wouldn't ya, Chief?"

A harsh, incomprehensible muttering came from behind the barricade of papers. The sound of a snapping pencil caused Havoc to grin, knowing his shot landed.

"That's the whole point of the cig-saver in the first place! I just need a little bit of start-up capital and this baby can hit stores by November." Havoc shot an inquisitive look at Breda as he continued. "With some cash and a good-looking poster, they'll be flying off the shelves."

"I'll tell you what," Breda mused. "I'll lend you some cash and we'll make a little bet; if this thing doesn't sell, I get my start-up money back in full plus interest, which will be decided based on how quickly this thing burns."

"That sounds like a crap deal. What's in it for me?" Havoc eyed him warily.

"If you actually sell these things, then you can have the rights to the advertising ideas I'm about to give you." Breda bribed, seeing that he had already won Havoc over as well as the bet itself.

"But if you advertise for him, he has a better chance of winning. After all, if the rights are going to be his reward, it'll have to be a good ad campaign." Falman noted, speaking up from the monotonous work of filing the colonel's paperwork. "It just seems like this is a no-win situation for you, Breda."

"Nah, see, I want old Jean here to succeed. I'm just making sure my money isn't going to get flushed down the shitter on this one."

"Hey!" Havoc interjected. "I have a little more business sense than that, thank you very much! I _have_ worked in my family store, you know." He frowned, crossing his arms defensively as he leaned back in his chair, balanced on two of the legs.

"Just a little insurance never hurt. All I'm saying." Breda shrugged before flipping over a piece of paperwork and pulling out a pen. "So what I'm thinking is the ad should show the product being used, right? And what sells a product better than sex?" Without waiting for an answer, he continued, scratching lines on the paper as he went. "So we have a hot, naked chick in the shower. We gotta cover her up, 'cause of the kids and all that, but we can have her peeking around the shower curtain, like this…" A stick figure illustrated his point, half-hidden behind a strangely-shaped quadrilateral.

"But that's not sexy enough," Haovc protested, snatching the pen out of Breda's hand. "Damned kids made us lose the whole point of the ad. But… if we make her have huge knockers…" the pen slid across the paper in a circular motion, "and some sexy hair…" curls appeared on the stick figure's circular scalp, "then we're back on track!"

"If she's in the shower, her hair's gotta be wet, dumbass," Breda grumbled as he snatched his pen back. "Otherwise she wouldn't need the cig-saver. Besides, wet is way sexier."

A faint noise of approval came from across the room, and a hand lifted in a thumbs-up motion over the sea of crisp white on the colonel's desk.

"No, it isn't! Then her hair gets all weighed down and darkens. It starts dripping everywhere, and then they do that weird thing where they tie it up and twist it all around into one of those towel hats. That's not sexy, that's witchcraft! I don't care how big her tits are!" Havoc exclaimed, his voice rising with each sentence. The scene he was causing caused no-one to realize that the door had opened.

A calm voice came from Havoc's left side, "I don't think I even want to ask."

Havoc looked up, terrified at having been caught not doing his work. Lieutenant Hawkeye, however, had already left him to his own devices. She had a towel draped over her shoulders, guarding her brown turtleneck from her hair, which fell down her back. "Colonel, something went wrong with my hairdryer. I have tried everything, but nothing makes it work. I hate to interrupt you while you're actually doing your work, but could you transmute it and see if that fixes it? My hair takes so long to dry that I'll be wearing this lovely fashion accessory the rest of the day, otherwise." She lifted the edges of the towel and tried to dry her hair a bit more by using friction.

"Of course, Lieutenant." Mustang grinned, overjoyed at having time to ignore his work, and without any threats, at that. He disappeared back behind his desk as he dug through the clutter of his bottom drawers in search of a piece of chalk. It had been a while since he had done anything like this, and he wanted a medium that was erasable should he make a mistake.

Havoc stared unabashedly across the room, taking in the lieutenant's profile. The hair, the tight-fitting shirt, it just worked too well. Without his knowledge or permission, his mind wandered until she was the stick-figure in the ad. He went slack-jawed, his cigarette falling from his mouth and his cheeks tinging red. No, it was forbidden for any of them to think of her like that. She was their lieutenant. Furthermore, she was _Mustang's_ lieutenant. But damn if she didn't have a nice pair of-

"What the hell is wrong with you?!" Hawkeye shouted, appearing suddenly before Havoc's desk. She deftly slid the top to Havoc's cig-saver shut, trapping his forgotten cigarette inside. In a manner of seconds the glow began to fade as the lack of oxygen put it out. It was rare for Hawkeye to use such a loud tone of voice, and Havoc honestly believed that she was capable of seeing what was going on in his mind. Startled out of any thoughts he may have had – or may not have had, definitely didn't have – he took a couple seconds to jump back onto the same wavelength as everyone else. The first thing he registered was that he was being berated by Hawkeye.

"Don't you know that some plastics are toxic when they're melted? Do you know what hydrogen cyanide is?!" Hawkeye demanded, her amber eyes flashing with disbelief and anger.

"Hydrogen cyanide, sometimes called prussic acid, is an organic compound with the chemical formula-"

"Falman, I appreciate that you're trying to help, but I am trying to get a point across to Lieutenant Havoc." Hawkeye's voice was perfectly calm and stable as she spoke to Falman, but she doubled back on her tone when her eyes turned back to Havoc. "It's lethal, Lieutenant. You could have killed everyone in this room with your inattentiveness if you had managed to melt that entire box." She turned her back on him, muttering something that sounded like "gone for fifteen minutes" as she took her repaired hairdryer from the Colonel. As she headed for the door, she implored "Please don't try to kill one another with toxic compounds while I am away. If you can restrain yourselves for the next ten minutes, that is." The door shut behind her with a little more force than was necessary.

"Damn…" Havoc sighed as he lit another cigarette. "It's probably a good thing that I ditched the attached straw-delivered alcohol system, then, huh?" He took a long draw from his cigarette before exhaling the smoke lazily into the room. "I think you're pretty spot-on with that poster, there, Breda. Now, how about the tag line?"


End file.
